The sale of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi for $450m (including fees) at Christie’s New York on 15 November shattered every record for art prices. Since then, speculation about the identity of the buyer has ranged from Chinese billionaires to the Microsoft co-founder and Leonardo Codex collector Bill Gates; from French government officials for Abu Dhabi to the Qatari royal family and even, among conspiracy theorists in the darker corners of the internet, President Vladimir Putin.

One less fantastical suggestion is that the buyer is Ken Griffin, who set up the global investment firm Citadel. Multiple sources suggest that Griffin planned to lend or donate the work to the Art Institute of Chicago…read more

The majority of artists in the UK earn less than £5,000 a year after tax and below $10,000 in the US , according to a survey of 1,533 practitioners, conducted this month by the online artist-to-market website Artfinder.

Dubbed the “Artist Income Project”, this first survey of anonymous data across several platforms, including Artfinder, finds “artists are still not paid fairly. Or at all.” All the surveyed artists are described as “independent”, meaning they sell their art directly, rather than through a gallery…read more

Is the Louvre Museum getting another world-class Leonardo da Vinci to hang alongside the Mona Lisa? If the museum’s director Jean-Luc Martinez has his way, it will—temporarily. Hyperallergic‘s Ben Sutton was the first to flag an interview between Martinez and French radio station RTL in which the museum director revealed that he hoped to borrow the work for a blockbuster Leonardo exhibition next year.

The presentation will coincide with the 30th anniversary celebration of the “Grand Louvre” renovation and expansion. “We hope to see Salvator Mundi in Paris,” Martinez said. “The goal is to gather the greatest number of works by Leonardo.” The Louvre owns five of the 15 extant Leonardo paintings… read more